Rethink urged on skilled trades' value

Rethink urged on skilled trades' value

Bill Gawley is an electrician for Chrysler in Windsor, Ont. He is pictured Friday, June 8, 2012, at his Windsor home.Photo by
Dan Janisse

Bill Gawley recalls his teachers telling him to avoid the trades, go to university and get an office job if he wanted a decent career with good pay.

"The trades were for people who really couldn't think, people who couldn't handle what they considered to be the real world of academia," he says.

Gawley was ready to listen to them. But when his dad became ill, he was compelled to become a wage earner for the family and get a job on Chrysler's production line in Windsor, Ont., in 1977.

Twelve years later, he was accepted into an electrician's apprenticeship with Chrysler and has remained with the company in the same city ever since.

The automaker continued to need Gawley's talents despite downturns in the automotive sector over the succeeding decades.

"For the most part, trades in Windsor - the in-plant people - are doing very nicely," says Gawley, 55, who makes about $40 an hour, enjoys a robust benefits package and has a pension plan that will make retirement for him quite comfortable.

Many people have been steered away from the trades by their teachers, parents or both. It is perhaps a big reason why a recent survey by international staffing firm ManpowerGroup found skilled trades to be the most difficult jobs to fill by Canadian employers.

"Parents would not drive their kids into a skilled-trades area because they're making the assumption that it's a tough career, that it could be unsafe," says Byrne Luft, vice-president of operations for Manpower Canada. "But what they don't understand is that skilled trades looks very different today. It is much safer . . . (and) the money you can make in skilled trades in phenomenal."

Dwayne Avery, 40, has enjoyed a career as a millwright that started in Calgary in the mid-1990s, led him to St. John's, Halifax and eventually took him back to his hometown of Corner Brook, N.L.

He's making $30 an hour at a pulp-and-paper mill run by Kruger Inc., but considering a move to an offshore oil rig that could pay him triple that.

"I could probably have 10 different jobs within 30 minutes if I left here," Avery says.

Benjamin Tal, deputy chief economist for CIBC World Markets, says the shortage of skilled labourers is poised to be the most significant problem in Canada's labour market in the coming years, and is already a significant issue.

Tal says the skilled labour shortage ultimately prevents companies and the economy from growing to its potential.

"This is a major, major problem, and it will get bigger if we don't deal with it. . . . The speed limit of this economy will be reduced, and that will impact the standard of living for everybody," he says.

Sneh Seetal, spokeswoman for Calgary-based energy Suncor Energy Inc., says the company learned lessons in the past when it couldn't hire people - including skilled-trades workers - fast enough to keep up with its growth plans.

As a result, the company's current growth targets are now more aligned with practical expectations of how quickly it can hire, she says.

"We've really developed a very disciplined and staged growth plan, and that's one of the things we've done to manage our workforce labour requirements," she says.

Luft says a shortage of skilled trades workers is fuelling wage inflation for certain professions, which hampers companies' ability to be profitable. There is so much competition for these workers, he says, it makes many employers reluctant to train or take on apprentices for fear their investment will be lost if that individual's tenure at the company is short.

Tal says more co-operation should take place between industry and post-secondary schools to reduce the "mismatch" among eligible workers and what employers need.

Seetal says Suncor is trying to make sure it keeps the workers it already has through generous compensation plans and nurturing those with leadership aspirations. She adds that the company works with post-secondary schools in Alberta to help make sure they're producing the kind of workers Suncor needs, such as machine operators, electricians and pipe fitters.

Gawley, meanwhile, says the value of trades needs to be promoted at the high school level. "As a society, we're really going to have to put a marketing strategy - for lack of a better word - together to get people into the trades."

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